Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising [Paperback]

Steve Kosareff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 2005

When television sets were still a luxurious novelty, manufacturers had to sell the new technological wonders by emphasizing their most glamorous, comforting, and appealing attributes. Window to the Future is a nostalgic, humorously prescient look at the ads and graphics that introduced TV to a consumer public who would make it a fixture in the home within a few short years. From fanciful visions in early radio magazines to the lifestyle ads in the heyday of the "talking picture box," Window to the Future brims with images that projected idealized scenarios of the television as a treasured addition to the household. Celebrities who would come to dominate the medium (Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan not least) endorsed the latest Westinghouses and Zeniths, while illustrations of dapper men and elegant women hosting cocktail hour in front of their new black-and-white console projected the party trend of the future. More than 150 print advertisements, magazine covers, and catalog images show the evolution of our complex relationship with this ubiquitous domestic appliance and a pixellated trip down memory lane of television's youthful innocence.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steve Kosareff is an expert on the history of television. A resident of Santa Monica, California, he is gathering support for a museum dedicated to the medium. This is his first book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (March 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811846326
• ISBN-13: 978-0811846325
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #999,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating social document, May 30, 2005

By 

R. Gale (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising (Paperback)

This book largely compiles magazine advertisements for television sets spanning from 1946 until 1970, and it's fascinating to see how the medium and the device were sold to the American public. If you're a boomer (like I am), you'll enjoy it, and if you're interested in vintage advertising, you'll find it an essential addition to your library. It will variously make you laugh, scratch your head, and drop your mouth open in disbelief. My only criticism of the book (which prevented me from giving it a 5 star rating) is that the physical size of the boom is a bit small: the ads it contains originally appeared in large format magazines such as Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post, and their reproduction on the smaller sized pages of this book makes many of them difficult to read without a magnifying glass. I suppose that's the trade-off for a lower price. Highly recommended!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tube hype, September 23, 2005

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising (Paperback)

What irony to realise that the colorful ads in this book pushed a product that eventually killed off the very magazines that the ads appeared in. Madison Avenue had no further use for the mass consumer titles of the day (Life, Look, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post) once a television was in every living room.

The ninety-three ads in the book are a wonderful examples of how the set manufacturers pitched their new product to the public, there are eight ads using paintings to show folks dressed as suave sophisticates admiring their Zenith Black Magic sets or using personalities of the day, Rogers and Hammerstein for RCA, Martin and Lewis, Edgar Bergen or Bert Lancaster for Magnavox. RCA in 1958 ran a particularly creative ad in Colliers which involved holding a photo of the bottom half of a color TV screen on a black and white set, NBC then froze, for a minute, the program so viewers could marvel at what they saw, the top half in black and white, the bottom in color, imagine that happening today.

As well as the TV ads the author has included other related material, drink ads that show the sets as a focal point in social groups, especially for sporting events, several magazine covers featuring TV sets and nicely twelve super futuristic paintings by Charles Schridde that ran in consumer magazines in the early Sixties.

The book is well produced and all the ads are readable unlike another book of ads I bought recently, 'What's Your Poison: addictive advertising of the 40s-60s' (ISBN 1933112026) which is only 6.5 inches deep and text in the ads is certainly not readable. If you like consumer advertisements of the past have a look at All-American Ads of the 50s, a monster 926 page treasure-trove of colorful selling from the Atomic Age.

5.0 out of 5 stars brings back memories, June 21, 2009

By 

Retro Artist, Tina Schmidt - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising (Paperback)

excellent retro resource book of advertisements and the look of the era - the 60's. It covers lots of interesting themes that were popular: cars, aerospace, technology, industry, clothing, fashion, an overview time capsule of the commercial side of everything 60's we (some of us) grew up with.